but somehow the end of it, the final fix? Why would anyone expect that?
Have you met a Lisp advocate?
More seriously, programming is as you say a way of turning thoughts into mechanical implementations. But not everyone thinks the same way or finds the same things intuitive. So some people stumble across Lisp or Forth and find it matches their way of thinking so perfectly that they can't understand why not everyone agrees.
Pragmatism counts for a lot in programming language deployment too. There was no big platform that required or encouraged Lisp in the way that Sun did for Java, the browser does for Javascript, or web backend did for PHP and Perl.